Modern Berlin is the latest map from Blue Crow Media. The spike of interest in architecture-related travel continues unabated with Phaidon’s Mid-Century Modern Architecture Travel Guide: West Coast USA. Modern architecture has always had this problem of being reduced to … Continue reading →

The Food Timeline takes you on a historical journey back to the earliest recipes, and before / Taste, a ‘Design Observer Symposium on Food and Visual Culture’ / Various Small Fires has a piece on Adrian Street, a 70s-era wrestler … Continue reading →

The Downstairs Gays, a tale of double kitchens, cyber-stalking and of digging yourself deeper and deeper with Google: ‘the second hit was his website, [hisname].com, which featured a sidebar of links, including his Twitter, his Instagram, his résumé, his portfolio, … Continue reading →

Nostalgia and technology, music and memory / the Aibos are dying. Back in 1999, they really did seem like the future / a post celebrating the glorious world that was SNUB-TV, coming via the world of Spamula.net, one of those … Continue reading →

The Art of Smallfilms from Four Corners Books looks at the of Oliver Postgate (who died in 2008) and Peter Firmin (still producing beautiful prints). There’s a preview of the book at Creative Review or you can visit The Smallfilms … Continue reading →

Old school memories today. Another volume of the great Bedroom Cassette Masters series has just been released / a huge tranche of pixel-perfect original arcade emulations is now live over at The Internet Arcade (via MeFi, from whence this instructional … Continue reading →

A fantastically creepy whispered version of The Wind in the Willows. The book has one of our favourite endpapers: The Wind in the Willows, illustration by E.H.Shepard (as is the above image) – the definitive edition. Visit the Kenneth Grahame … Continue reading →

Many of the great British designers and inventors of the modern era have a nostalgic glint in their eye for boyhood dreams that never quite came to fruition. Norman Foster is probably the leader of this group of overgrown schoolboys: … Continue reading →

Yet another shape for future magazines, House takes the meat of House & Garden magazine and splices it with a Pinterest-y scroll of nugget-sized article. Against the increasingly homogenised view of publishing that is emerging from this model, lovingly curated … Continue reading →

The Japanese island of Hashima regularly crops up in online discussions of the ruins of the industrial age. A rocky island, ‘populated from 1887 to 1974 as a coal mining facility,’ it’s featured regularly in documentaries and photographic essays, the … Continue reading →

If we were twittering types, we’d disseminate this one far and wide: the Playmobil Furnished Shopping Mall, presented in its current catalogue as ‘a girl’s dream brought to life in the Modern Shopping Centre’. Ah, someone else has done exactly … Continue reading →

Make your own space. Following on from the space simulator built into a caravan, we trawled around to find this list of ‘five homemade flight simulators‘. Alternatively, if you have a spare £3.25m you could buy this South London mansion, … Continue reading →

Coming to an office near you: ‘One recent study by academics at Oxford University suggests that 47% of today’s jobs could be automated in the next two decades.’ / wish we’d thought of this: Craigslist Mirrors (via, and also picked … Continue reading →

Experimental Travel is the art of travelling in new ways, including such sub-genres as Aerotourism (‘in which a tourist visits the local airport and explores it without going anywhere’) and Erotourism (‘in which a couple travels separately to the same … Continue reading →

Twenty years seems to be a trigger point for all sorts of nostalgia, a drag net through the past that scrapes at the lingering memories of pop culture and then hauls them, kicking and screaming, into the light of the … Continue reading →

We haven’t really had enough time to digest the existence of the Southampton Nostalgia Scale, via this post on the Benefits of Nostalgia, linking to a recent NYT piece that explores what nostalgia is good for. From the article: ‘Nostalgia … Continue reading →

Another made-for-web piece of analogue fetishism, Kai Schaefer’s series ‘World Records‘, which brings together classic vinyl and classic turntables / as nostalgic vessels go, this is perhaps less involved and drawn out than creating an entire imaginary soundtrack that purports … Continue reading →

And so we find ourselves on the edge of the year, without all that much inclination to look back (that’s a job that others can do with so much more depth and expertise). Things magazine feels increasingly marginal, hovering on … Continue reading →